Trentonian editorial: Race apparatchiks

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of the day when skin color would be a permissible possible factor, among others, when assessing people’s character, providing the aim is to advance “diversity.”

Hey, wait. That doesn’t sound right. Let’s look that up. Here it is. King dreamed of the day when people would — quote — “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” King didn’t tack on any slippery lawyer verbiage.

In fact he had his doubts about “affirmative action” based on race. He had a better idea. Base it instead on economic background. That makes it more inclusive and avoids the divisive entanglement of race.

Not-so-rich kids of European or Asian ancestry would thereby get consideration for college admission they might not otherwise get — but so would many African American and Latino kids. “It is a simple matter of justice,” he said, that efforts to lift up disadvantaged blacks not overlook “the forgotten white poor.”

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King was one of the first to urge this approach. Another guy who later picked up on the idea was a rising-star politician out Chicago way with the odd-sounding name Barack Obama.

Now here we are back before the U.S. Supreme Court splitting constitutional hairs and exchanging legal sophistries in behalf of now institutionalized and bureaucratized ethnic and racial bean-counting.

This time it’s the University of the Texas that’s insisting that academia’s and government’s vast race-sorting apparatus be perpetuated to promote — cue a celestial chorus of angels here — “diversity.”

By “diversity,” the academics and the government bureaucrats mean, of course, the most superficial aspect of the concept, namely, skin color.

They have little or no interest in diversity of a more significant nature.

Were it otherwise, universities would not now be bastions of lockstep political predilection with First Amendment-infringing speech codes. They would not now be rigid social milieus where nonconforming voices are banned or shouted off the stage.

The practical result of affirmative action is exactly as Justice Lewis Powell in the 1978 Bakke case feared: “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past,” that punishes those “who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered.”

Meanwhile, favored minority students are put in a competitive academic situation for which they may not be prepared, and ones who are prepared are unfairly put under suspicion of having been given a break based solely of race or ethnicity.

The court-watching consensus seems to be that the justices again by a narrow margin will put additional limitations on affirmative action, but as in the past will do so in a murky way that will generate yet more litigation.

Obama could put an end to the charade by moving to implement King’s — and his — idea.

That, however, would rile the affirmative action apparatchiks who have become a major component of the president’s party.